Media
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Brazil Coup: ‘They Let Everybody Know the US Was on the Side of This Coup’
Janine Jackson interviewed Mark Weisbrot about the ouster of Brazil’s President Dilma Rousseff for the September 9, 2016, episode of CounterSpin. This is a lightly edited transcript. Continue reading
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‘We Are Criminalizing Transparency to Protect Illegitimate Uses of Power’
Janine Jackson: If the expression “I can’t breathe” holds power for you, it’s because of Ramsey Orta. He’s the one who held his cellphone camera steady while New York police officer Daniel Pantaleo choked the life out of Eric Garner in July of 2014. Continue reading
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Media Undermine Democracy by Speculating Wildly About Undermining Democracy
The relentless drumbeat of Trump–as–Russian agent takes hasn’t ceased since the news broke of a likely Russian hack of the Democratic National Committee in June—and it probably won’t stop until Election Day. One sub-genre of this line of thinking however—that Russia will literally hack our election process and throw the US into a dystopian constitutional… Continue reading
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NYT: Corbyn Has Marginalized Labour With His Popular Positions
It’s probably true that Corbyn is more skeptical of the United States and NATO than the average Brit. But it’s hard not to get the impression that certain positions are identified by Erlanger as problematic not because they’re unpopular with Corbyn’s constituents—but because they’re unpopular with the New York Times. Continue reading
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'Invisibilizing the Workers Who Actually Do the Work'
Janine Jackson assembled some of CounterSpin‘s best segments on workers and media for a special September 2, 2016, episode for Labor Day. This is a lightly edited transcript. Continue reading
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This Guardian Piece Touting Bill Gates' Education Investment Brought to You by… Bill Gates
What the piece failed to note—other than the fact that Rhee’s tenure left DC’s schools “worse by almost every conceivable measure” (Truthout, 10/23/13)—is that multi-billionaire Bill Gates is both the major investor of the company administering the Liberian education overhaul and the principal of the Gates Foundation, sponsor of the Guardian’s Global Development vertical, where… Continue reading
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PR Firm Says It Ghost-Wrote Thousands of Op-Eds in Major US Papers
PR Firm Says It Ghost-Wrote Thousands of Op-Eds in Major US Papers. The Wall Street Journal put Bill Ingram’s name on an op-ed–but a PR firm says it actually wrote it. Continue reading
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‘They Are Incentivized to Arrest People Because It Raises Money’
Donna Murch: “Nearly everyone who’s being arrested or incarcerated is incurring criminal justice debt. And in many states you can be stripped of your right to vote until you pay off all of your criminal justice debt. So I talk about that essentially as a modern day poll tax.” Continue reading
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Felicia Kornbluh on the Politics of Welfare
It was 20 years ago this month that Bill Clinton eliminated the federal guarantee of assistance to poor families. Corporate media played a key role in persuading the public that Aid to Families with Dependent Children—representing less than 1-and-a-half percent of federal outlay from 1964 to 1994—was somehow bleeding the country dry. Continue reading
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NYT Touts Honduras as Ad for 'American Power'–Leaving Out Support for Murderous Coup Regime
17 August 2016 — FAIR “How the Most Dangerous Place on Earth Got Safer” was the headline over the lead article in the New York Times‘ “Week in Review” (8/11/16), with the teaser reading, “Programs funded by the United States are helping transform Honduras. Who says American power is dead?” Continue reading
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NYT Touts Honduras as Ad for ‘American Power’–Leaving Out Support for Murderous Coup Regime
17 August 2016 — FAIR “How the Most Dangerous Place on Earth Got Safer” was the headline over the lead article in the New York Times‘ “Week in Review” (8/11/16), with the teaser reading, “Programs funded by the United States are helping transform Honduras. Who says American power is dead?” Continue reading
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Election Meddling: Bad if Done to USA, Bad to Complain About if Done by USA
The Washington Post (8/10/16) published what has to be one of the most naked examples of projection ever displayed by a major American paper. The Post’s editorial board, in another effort to bash Russia, lumped its President Vladimir Putin and Turkey’s increasingly autocratic ruler President Recep Tayyip Erdogan into a generic “strongman” category, and warned… Continue reading
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The Arms Trade: 'You Don’t Get the Full Picture of What a Devastating Trade This Is'
Success is success after all, and for all the tales of a muckraking media, our guest’s experience suggests that when it comes to one of the most stupendously successful US industries, the press corps don’t seem all that eager to look behind the curtain. Continue reading
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How Media Distorted Syrian Ceasefire’s Breakdown
Coverage of the breakdown of the partial ceasefire in Syria illustrated the main way corporate news media distort public understanding of a major foreign policy story. The problem is not that the key events in the story are entirely unreported, but that they were downplayed and quickly forgotten in the media’s embrace of themes with… Continue reading
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NYT Reveals Think Tank It’s Cited for Years to Be Corrupt Arms Booster
A recent New York Times article (8/7/16) detailed, in often scathing terms, what many media critics already knew: that think tanks are frequently not objective, neutral arbiters of information, but corporate- and government-funded agenda-promoters with an academic veneer to give the appearance of impartiality. Continue reading
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Damning evidence reveals the BBC’s role in the Labour coup By James Wright
Damning evidence has exposed the BBC’s role in advancing the Labour coup. The UK’s public service broadcaster gave double the airtime to Jeremy Corbyn’s critics than to his allies at the start of the coup, according to new content analysis. Continue reading
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US-Led Airstrikes Kill as Many Civilians as Nice Attack–but Get No Front-Page Headlines in Major US Papers
A coalition airstrike reported on Tuesday that killed at least 85 civilians—one more than died in the Nice attack in France last week—wasn’t featured at all on the front pages of two of the top US national newspapers, the New York Times and LA Times, and only merited brief blurbs on the front pages of… Continue reading
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A Mass Murderer Becomes a ‘Terrorist’–Based on Ethnicity, Not Evidence
17 July 2016 — FAIR The New York Times (7/15/16), writing about the man who reportedly killed 84 people in a truck attack in Nice, France, provided no evidence that Mohamed Lahouaiej Bouhlel was motivated by either politics or religion to commit violence—yet still labeled the murders as “terrorism,” as though the definition of that Continue reading
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Some Pundits Think the Solution to Right-Wing Populism Is Less Democracy
The core orthodoxies of neoliberalism are under attack by populist forces, and commentators are scrambling for a response. Some are suggesting more left-wing red meat. Others, a moment of self-reflection. But a number of pundits are doing that most noxious of political commentary pastimes—equating right and left responses to the failures of globalization and advocating… Continue reading
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Putin Conspiracies, Obama Nonintervention Blamed for Brexit By Adam Johnson
The referendum results in favor of Britain leaving the European Union seemed to have caught most Western media off guard. Betting markets and the pundit class had heavily favored a vote to keep the UK in the EU, but at around midnight on the US East Coast, it became increasingly clear Britain would be supporting… Continue reading
The New Dark Age 